In this video, we're gonna look at three stories involving caving that went horrifyingly wrong.
The first story involves a particularly gruesome incident even for caving.
As always, viewer discretion is advised.
[music]
On May 11th, 1975, Bill and Joe were making their fourth visit to an opening
known as Dig Spring that they found to be blowing air.
This meant that there was likely some underground labyrinth below that had yet to be explored.
As experienced cavers, there was almost nothing more exciting than this.
So this fourth trip was another attempt to dig out the entrance and see what was below the ground,
and on that fourth visit, they had come prepared.
This time, they had a winch and cables to pull a large rock from the entrance.
From an alcove about eight feet (2.4 m) wide and about six feet (1.83 m) high,
two large boulders lay across the spring, blocking the opening.
In the past three visits, they tried using a sledgehammer to break apart the rocks
or wedge them away from the wall, but these had almost no effect.
That's why they figured they try winching them out of place this time.
They started by digging an area around the boulder to minimize suction from the mud surrounding them.
This would also help them find a solid area to place the chains to winch these boulders out.
As they were doing this, Bill started sort of digging wildly and got carried away
and started digging away from the base of the boulder and more toward the right wall of the alcove.
As they worked, Joe absentmindedly thought to himself that
he hoped that the wall didn't topple over them as they were digging.
About a minute or two later, he saw some crumbs of dirt roll down from the side of one of the large blocks
and looked up, expecting to see someone standing above them on the small cliff.
Instead, just as he had worried about, the massive three-ton blocks
started toppling over, directly toward both men.
In a split second, he jumped as far as he could to the other side of the alcove,
and as he did this, he yelled to Bill that it was falling and to get out,
but Bill was crouched right at the base of the wall.
He had just a split second to make a small move to his left before he was hit by the boulders.
The whole stack collapsed and made a horrible ripping sound as it did.
The bottom boulder was stopped by another outcropping,
but the upper boulder slid right off the lower one and impacted the right side of Bill's body
and knocked him to the ground.
Once the dust had cleared, Joe got up and looked over at Bill
and saw that his shirt was in shreds, his shoulder was bent at a horrifying angle,
and he had a deep gouge in his arm that went right to the bone.
Bill just muttered that he thought he was gonna black out,
and then Joe ran off for help as fast as he could.
He found the nearest person and asked them to call an ambulance
and then grabbed some clothing from his car and ran back to the cave entrance.
He spent the next 40 minutes keeping pressure on Bill's wounds
and talking to him to keep him conscious while they waited for help to arrive.
First, they had to dig his foot out from the rubble before they could finally get him on a stretcher,
and then to the hospital.
He went on to have five hours of surgeries to help repair a broken jaw, broken shoulder, broken forearm,
and all sorts of nerve, muscle, and blood vessel tears in his arm.
The surgeon would even say that the injuries were as bad
as any he'd seen from survivors of mining accidents.
But despite how bad it was,
they did both consider themselves lucky that Joe had seen the crumbs rolling down.
If he hadn't seen them, they would have no warning,
and it's likely that Bill would've been fully crushed by the three-ton boulders.
On March 16th, 1968, at about 10:00 AM,
Gerald, Ronald, Andrew, and Michael entered a cave known as McFail's Cave through the Ack's Shack entrance.
This consisted of a fenced-off sinkhole with No Trespassing signs,
and in the middle is just a little man-sized hole in the bottom.
This then opens up further into an 8 by 15-foot (2.4 x 4.6 m) pit that's around 45 feet (13.7 m) deep.
At the bottom of this pit, a second fissure opens up into another 40-foot (12.2 m) pit,
but this one is only two feet (0.61 m) wide at its widest.
This then narrows further to just one foot or less at the ends.
Finally, at the bottom is a little crawl that connects to the main passages to access the full cave.
During rain or wet weather, a small stream runs into this pit
and forms a waterfall about 10 feet (3.05 m) below the top and flows through this crawlway.
That day, although there were still lots of snow and ice on the ground,
it was above freezing, causing one of these waterfalls to form.
After several hours of exploring at around 1:30 PM,
the group decided to call it for the day and headed for the exit.
As they made their way to the crawlway, they realized that there was a lot more water coming through
and the waterfall was considerably larger.
The already normally wet pit was much colder and deeper,
and was much more challenging to navigate through.
After struggling for what seemed like forever,
Ronald matched to make it up and was told by the others to go for help right away.
He got to a nearby farm and called 911,
and at about 3:30 PM, firefighters got to the entrance of McFail's Cave.
A fireman was then lowered into the upper pit by Andrew and Michael to help with the ropes.
Ronald descended as well after that and started passing a rope to Gerald,
who was the only one left in the lower pit.
By then, he had been pelted by the frozen meltwater for some time
and was calling for the others to be lifted up.
Ronald came back up and told them that he passed the rope to Gerald,
but couldn't tell if he'd been able to tie himself off.
By this point Michael and Andrew were also getting hypothermic,
so they were assisted out and then taken to the hospital.
At the same time, a fireman pulled desperately on the rope,
which they weren't even sure was tied to Gerald.
They pulled it until it was taut and then tied it to a tree.
Then, a fireman went back down and tried to squeeze into the lower pit, but was unsuccessful.
He was able to get a look at Gerald and saw that he was on the rope
and he had been lifted up and wedged in the narrow section of the pit.
His helmet was tipped forward and the water ran over his face.
The fireman spoke to him, but his voice was weak and was weakening by the second.
About half an hour later, at around 4:00 PM,
the fireman was pulled out and rescuers went to look for a smaller person
to go down to hopefully be able to squeeze into the lower pit.
At the same time, everyone else piled logs and shoveled snow in an attempt
to reduce the flow of water down into the opening.
Finally, at 5:00 PM, a local 17-year-old volunteered to go down to attempt to rescue.
He was given a wetsuit fixed with a harness, and then lowered in.
On this first attempt, he got caught in the path of the waterfall
and was asked to be pulled out because of how quickly he was cooling down.
Rescuers pulled him up and he spent some time warming up by a fire and then agreed to try again.
This time, he was lowered all the way to the bottom and managed to get a good look at Gerald.
He tried to move the rope around to free it and allowed Gerald to be pulled up, but this didn't work.
Then, he asked everyone to lower Gerald down a little bit and then pull him back up again.
But because the space they were working was just a foot-wide,
he kept getting wedged and couldn't be pulled up.
Finally, another local boy was lowered in, also in a wetsuit,
and was able to get all the way down into the second pit with Gerald.
He saw that Gerald was completely white and stiff,
but he was able to guide his body out of the narrow section as they were both pulled up.
He was finally retrieved from the cave at 6:10 PM and examined by a doctor.
Horrifyingly, the doctor found that he had already been dead for almost two hours due to hypothermia.
At just 13 years old, Gary Mahr from St. Louis, Missouri, started getting into more and more serious trouble.
In the past couple of months, he'd fallen into with the wrong crowd,
he started wandering off at night and not coming home,
and eventually started to have run-ins with the police on a regular basis.
Despite his mom's effort to discipline him and keep him out of trouble,
the situation kept getting worse and worse until she was at the end of her rope.
The area that they lived in as well wasn't a great neighborhood with lots of crime and poverty,
and she worried that if she didn't get her son on the right path soon,
it might set the tone for the rest of his life.
Eventually, things escalated to the point that he was forced to go to a juvenile detention center
for troubled youth known as the St. Joseph's Home for Boys.
As hard as it was for her son to be sent away,
she knew that the situation was out of control and hoped that this might be the environment
that he needed that she was having a hard time providing.
For the time being, until he straightened out, he would only be able to come home every other weekend.
A few weeks into his stay at the boys' home,
there was a massive and record flooding across the Midwest.
In just a few weeks, the flooding had resulted in dozens of deaths, billions of dollars of damages,
and left a 30,000 people homeless across the country.
And a few weeks into this flooding, there seemed to be no break in the rain and in the forecast -
despite all damage it had already caused.
With St. Louis sitting along the Mississippi River, there's already a flood wall in place,
but because of how severe the flood was, it had breached the wall at several different spots.
It took cleanup crews and city workers' days to brace and block off certain areas,
but eventually, they were able to reduce the overflow significantly.
By then, it seemed like everyone in the city was either immobilized
to reduce the flooding or suffering the effects of it.
One of the city's water treatment plants was even knocked out,
resulting in thousands without clean drinking water for some time.
Finally though, there was a break in the rain and the boys' home was able to get outside
and take the kids to the nearby Cliff Cave County Park.
Over the course of a three-day period,
several groups of the 50 or so boys in the home were taken to explore the park
and the historic Cliff Cave within it.
Just west of the Mississippi River, Cliff Cave is the longest in the county
with close to a mile of surveyed passages.
The large mouth of the cave is found at the end of a ravine,
and there's a small stream that disappears inside this large opening.
This mouth is also set into a cliffside and has an old brick pillar
that divides the opening into one large side and one smaller side.
This brick pillar is a glimpse of the colorful history the cave has had over the past couple of centuries.
Starting in the late 1700s, the cave was used as a tavern for French fur traders and trappers.
Then, during the American Civil War, it was used as a rendezvous point for confederate soldiers.
A few years after that, it was turned into a natural wine cellar by the Cliff Cave Wine Company.
The cool but moderate temperature inside made it perfect for storing up to a hundred thousand gallons at its peak.
It was around this time as well that the brick pillar was constructed at the entrance.
Eventually, it was sold by this wine company to a beer company, which used it for similar reasons.
Then, in the early 1900s, it became a place for criminals and outlaws
and was given the nickname "Jesse James Cave".
During this time as well, it was briefly used by the mob to discard dead bodies.
Finally though, in the 1970s, it was bought up by a conservation branch of the government
and turned into a regular old park - open to the public.
At around noon on Friday, another group of boys from St. Joseph's got to the park
just like the other groups in the past few days.
Gary was a part of this group, and in total, there were 16 boys between the ages of 7 and 14,
and four counselors to look after all the boys.
When they got to the park this time though, there were signs posted along the road
that said that the road was closed.
Not realizing that these signs hadn't been up in the previous few days,
and with it being a bright, sunny day,
the group continued past the signs and along the pathway to the cave entrance.
The reason that those roads had been closed was that there was some additional flooding
in some of the low-lying areas of the park.
Thankfully though, this didn't affect the cave at all,
so within no time, the kids were climbing around in the rocks and exploring the large entrance.
After some time playing around, one of the camp counselors who was an experienced caver,
asked if some of the boys want to go explore a little deeper.
With them being as young as they were, of the 16 boys, only five wanted to explore any further.
The rest of them saw the dark and narrow opening and were not at all interested.
Gary, on the other hand, wasn't afraid because two of the counselors would be with them,
so he volunteered, and then the group split off from the main group and entered the main tunnel.
From the large opening, the cave narrows into a single walkway about a person's height,
and slowly narrows even further from there.
Eventually, there's a fork off from the main passage
and several side passages open up into a winding network of tunnels.
As the boys got deeper in, the small stream running on the bottom
slowly crept up until it was about ankle height.
For a while, this level didn't change at all, but as I'm sure you're expecting by now -
soon, the water began to rise.
On that Friday, sometime after the group had gone deeper in, almost out of nowhere,
a torrential downpour started outside.
Initially, the group only noticed that the water was getting a little higher on their legs.
But soon, water was pouring in from the ceiling and down the walls,
creating literal waterfalls along the passages.
The kids screamed out and the group started running for the exit,
but then, a five-foot (1.5 m) wall of water came from the opposite direction
and swept their feet from under them and carried them back into the darkness.
They all struggled to keep their heads out of the water as the current carried them helplessly
and battered them along the walls.
Outside the cave, the sky had opened up just like it had the past few weeks,
and soon, the mouth of the cave was swirling with water.
Unbelievably, after all of the flooding and rain in the past few weeks,
and despite all of the damage it had done, there were still more.
And after so many weeks of this, the ground was completely saturated with water.
It just couldn't absorb anymore, and as it fell,
it washed downhill and inevitably, to sink holes and sumps that littered the area.
Unfortunately, this meant that the cave filled up much more quickly than usual,
on top of the fact that the amount of rain in itself was excessive.
The group outside the cave saw how quickly all of the water was draining into the area
and climbed up out of the ravine to higher ground.
And as soon as they were clear of the mouth, they contacted 911 from the safety of their vans.
The rain had just started around 1:45, and then just 15 minutes later,
the flash flood bursts through the area.
Within just half an hour, rescuers all descended on the cave
while the other group waited anxiously in their vans, parked along the access route.
Tragically, right at the mouth of the cave, were three bodies tangled together in between some trees.
They were floating in debris and wrapped in tree branches
and other stuff that had been washed in by the water.
This left just four more somewhere inside Cliff Cave
and their hope of finding any of them alive now was completely shattered.
At around 6:00 PM, they made it into the mouth of the cave
and started traveling through the waist-deep water in the corridors, looking for any other bodies or survivors.
The water was still much higher than had been that morning,
and it was difficult to wade through the sunken passages.
Then, another thousand feet in, they found a fourth body.
Using stretchers, they carefully transported the body back out into the heartbroken parents outside.
And rescuers would travel the entire 5,000 feet (1,524 m) and back multiple times,
but all they found were some t-shirts and shoes.
At this point, they started to consider the possibility that some of the bodies
might have been flushed out of the cave and down toward the Mississippi River.
This prompted them to walk the water's edge for another few hours that evening
until the search was finally called off for the day.
The experienced cavers who were brought in to help with the search
were not hopeful about finding anyone else alive.
That night still, many of the side passages were still flooded up to the ceiling.
They'd have to wait until the following day for the water to recede to access these areas.
In particular, there was an area that was completely flooded, known as Drapery Crawl.
This passage is just two to three feet high and requires that you crawl along your stomach
for up to 45 minutes to get through to the other side.
That night, the water was all the way up to the ceiling in Drapery Crawl.
The likelihood of someone being alive further in was low,
and it was expected to just be a body recovery.
The following morning at around 9:00 AM,
police and paramedics and cavers were all back at the cave and in the freezing cold water,
ready to find the missing group members.
They made their way back to Drapery Crawl about an hour later
to find that the water was low enough that they could search those areas.
They continued into a small side passage, and then they heard a noise.
At first, they thought the noise was coming from the searchers back behind them,
but then they heard it again.
The little voice of Gary Mahr somewhere in the darkness.
After the crawl, there was a little room about 10 feet wide and three feet high with a little pocket in the ceiling.
Gary was up against the wall, standing on a little ledge with his head poking into the pocket.
He called out to them and they ran over and got him down and onto a stretcher.
They covered him in blankets, and then finally, after almost 24 hours spent in the cold darkness,
he was brought out and into the sunlight.
The ledge that Gary was standing on was just a few inches wide - barely enough to stand on,
and below him was the cold, receding water.
If he had slipped, he would've probably died of hypothermia long before he was rescued.
Incredibly, despite everything, Gary was just happy to be rescued.
They got him some food and took him to his mom, but unfortunately, no one else would be as lucky.
Searchers were finally able to access the full length of the cave
and about 300 feet (91.4 m) further from where Gary was found, they found the final two bodies.
So out of the seven that had entered Cliff Cave the day prior, Gary was the only survivor.
Perhaps, worst of all, were the events that Gary conveyed when he was finally asked about the day prior.
Shortly after the group was hit by the rushing water, they were pushed under and fully submerged.
Gary got pushed under as well and held his breath and waited until his head was above water again.
As soon as it was, he took a quick breath and then got pushed under again almost right away.
This happened over and over and saw that the other kids that were with him were doing the same.
He heard their screams and their panic, and remembered that his sister,
who was a lifeguard, told him to try to stay calm
if he was ever in a situation where he was close to drowning.
This was the only thing that kept him calm
and gave him the presence of mind to feel out for the walls or ceiling, or anything else to grab onto.
This is when he managed to find a little crack that he grabbed onto
and pulled his face out of the water and up to the ceiling.
As he desperately held on, he heard one of the other kids scream
that he was too young to die and sat there, terrified, knowing that there was no way to help them.
Not long after that, the scream stopped.
In those first few hours, he clung onto the wall to keep himself out of the water,
and slowly moved his way up as the water receded.
Horrifyingly, he felt things bump into him in the darkness
and knew that these were the bodies of his dead friends, floating around in the water.
He spent the next 20 hours alone in the darkness on this little ledge.
He even heard the rescuers the night before get close to where he was
and saw their flashlights in the distance.
He screamed out to them, but because of the sound of the water, they weren't able to hear him.
You can only imagine how he must have felt when he didn't hear them anymore
and didn't see their flashlights.
Then, finally, after a long cold night, he heard them again and that's when he was rescued.
Following the events that day, Gary's mom decided that it was time for him to come home.
Not only was she just terrified that she was close to losing her son,
but she obviously no longer felt safe with him at the boys' home.
It was a fatal mistake to enter Cliff Cave that day,
and supposedly, someone in the park had even come by and warned them of the rain in the forecast,
but because they went in anyway, it cost the lives of six people.
Hello everyone and welcome to Scary Interesting.
If you have a story suggestion, feel free to submit it to email found in the description
or the Scary Interesting Subreddit.
Thank you all so much for watching, and hopefully, I will see you in the next one.